Day: March 25, 2014

Monday’s Mephisto versus Volador Puebla main event ended with the rarest of all possible CMLL finishes – no finish! The Invasors upset the Guerreros in the rudo versus rudos semifinal, then ran in and attacked Volador after what had been a brief match. The Invasors attacked Mephisto as well, and the Guerreros had to make the save.

Some CMLL nights are obviously important, like Friday night’s show. (By the way, our friends at wrestlingdata.com are going with 13,400 as attendance for that show, by the way, which would be far ahead of Terrible/Rush, actually beats the raging inferno that is AAA and Rey de Reyes, and throws into question how important Televisa TV for at least big shows, and now this paragraph really needs a restart.)

Some CMLL nights are obviously important, like Friday night’s show. Some nights are sneakily important. Today is a sneakily important day. Tonight’s show has a Gen14 vs Various Other People cibernetico, where the final eight luchadors advance to strangely important En Busca de Un Idolo tournament. CMLL holds a lot of tournaments which don’t mean anything for the winner, even Tanahashi winning the Universal tournament is not going to mean anything except being listed in a name of winners – we won’t much hear about the incredible pairs tournament for 11 months, they aren’t bring the Gran Alternativa up much. The En Busca de un Idolo has been different treated like the tournament that matters. Most (though not all) got a short term boost of interest just by being in the tournament. Making the field matters, and tonight’s ciberentico determines who makes the field.

The teams are the CMLL Segunda All Stars (name not official) of Canelo Casas, Cavernario, Guerrero Negro Jr., Herodes Jr., Metálico, Oro Jr., Soberano Jr., and Súper Halcón Jr. versus the Generacion 14 team Black Panther, Cachorro, Dragon Lee, El Rebelde, Espiritu Negro, Flyer, Hechicero, and Star Jr. CMLL’s preview of the event says “the final 8” advance into the the En Busca de Un Idolo tournament. It’s not impossible that this stipulation is mean to mean the winning team gets in, but it seems more like it’s just whoever happens to be the final eight moves on (and the match continues to the final, probably to tease an En Busca de un Idolo result.)

CMLL hasn’t been hinting at anything here, so the only way to draw conclusions on what will happen are guessing on usual biases. Canelo Casas, Black Panther, Cachorro, Dragon Lee, Flyer are all related to people high in the CMLL hierachy, and Dragon Lee and Canelo Casas were feuding for a couple of weeks. Herodes Jr., Cavernario are being treated as important people, and Super Halcon Jr. and Soberano are treated as somewhat important people. CMLL may have a different set of criteria for this tournament, but picking eight of those nine would be the closest thing to safe bet in a very unsure situation.

The eight which I’d like to see make the final, without regard to a rudo/tecnico mix, are Cavernario, Metálico, Oro Jr., Soberano Jr., El Rebelde, Hechicero, Black Panther and Cachorro (with Espiritu Negro as the toughest cut), but there are other people who would also make for an entertaining couple of months.

It bears repeating: if Hechicero is in En Busca de un Idolo and CMLL does not dramatically alter the way they run the tournament, Hechicero will advance to the final. The ultimate winner is a CMLL decision, but Hechicero will easily win the judges voting and easily win the fan voting under the system they’ve used the last two years. (CMLL’s changes in how they’ve run their website might mean that fan voting will change, but the judging marks might be alone enough to advance him a long way.) If Hechicero is part of the final 8 and nothing changes, then it’s really seven guys going for the other spot. That’s not a bad thing: Hechicero is skilled enough to be one of CMLL’s guys, but the only part he’s missing are the fans knowing who he is. Two months of spotlighted matches can take care of that.

None of this should be a surprise to CMLL; the people on the inside should know Hechicero will do well, so there’s no reason to include him even this far if that wasn’t the plan. Still, after last Friday, there’s a concern that CMLL is going to make an unpopular decision and going to make it worse for themselves by the timing of the decision. Hechicero being eliminated early by Super Halcon would get a lot of groans now. It would look even dumber a month from now when Hechicero continues to tear it up in trios while young guys have rookie type matches with each other in the tournament.

Today is also the CMLL debuts of Sanson and El Cuatrero, Cien Caras’s sons. Their first match is in Guadalajara and it’s unclear if they’re meant to just be Arena Coliseo Guadalajara or are joining the mass of Mexico City luchadors who’ve debuted since the start of the year

Primera Curerda (via SuperLuchas) says Dark Angel participated in a WWE tryout at NXT back in December. They also claim her recent trip to Chicago included a backstage trip to Raw, which from WWE wrestler Victoria introduced her to various people. They say she was complimented for all the obvious reasons, and for her ability to speak English, Spanish and French, but Dark Angel is still working for the time being. The report says she may get another tryout or a contract.

They also mention Heddi Karoui was also at the tryout and may be offered a spot to work on WWE’s new Cruiserweight-only show. This is where the report seems to fall apart: during a podcast just yesterday, Bryan Alvarez asked someone in WWE if there was a new Cruiserweight-only show in the works and was very definitively told no.

CMLL has not utilized Dark Angel as much as they could the last few years (definitely since she got her own deal in Japan, but arguably even farther back), and it would probably be an easy choice to go to WWE if offered. If she goes, the only surprise is how long it took WWE to figure out she’d be a good addition.

Euforia replaces Gran Guerrero in Friday’s title match. That’s for the best.

Maria del Angel is in poor shape after suffering a stroke, according to Lola Gonzalez.

Terra’s said they’ll be broadcasting Sunday’s show – and Friday’s show. No one’s explained what happened last Friday, and the bigger CMLL Friday night shows may end up on Terra in the future, but it may not be a good idea to count on them being there.

Skadi (or Skaði, a spelling which would never make it correctly onto a lucha libre poster) is a Norse goddess “associated with bowhunting, skiing, winter and mountains.” Sounds fun! The luchadora’s names are more creative in general, or at least the ones which make it to CMLL. Skadi’s just turned up in results since January, so either she’s very new or everyone was spelling it a different way. Lluvia is more familiar, but it’s taken her multiple knee surgeries to get back to this point.

Like this:

My TiVo died again Sunday, so I wasn’t able to record anything that aired on TV that day. At this point, it’s up to Comcast as to when I’ll be able to record again.

I instead attempted to record Multimedios and IWRG via their web feed. Multimedios failed, but I was able to screen record the AYM feed Sunday night. Like last time I tried this, I somehow got the video but not the sound. (The first and last matches had aired previously during the week, so they have sound and possibly better picture.) The SLP show has repeating during the week, and I’ll double up with that if I get the chance.

There were unrelated issues with the Puebla feed; I barely ended up with any of that, and will try to get the replay on Thursday. And Terra did not air on Friday and only aired about two matches on Sunday.

Due to another Fox/AAA overlap, we’re missing the AAA opener. We do have the missing AAA matches from the last couple weekends, off the UTDN feed.